The Headmaster's Wife (11 page)

Returning from the river to my house, I am aware of every sound. The smallest of things seems amplified now, my foot pressing on the loose floorboard of the third step on the stairs sounds like the crack of breaking ice.

I am curiously calm and want nothing more than to sleep. I want to close my eyes and disappear into sleep. But I know sleep will be elusive tonight, and it is, and I am lying in bed haunted by what took place just hours before in this very house when Elizabeth comes to me.

I do not remember the door opening, but suddenly she is there. It has been a long time since she came into my room, into my bed. She stands for a moment at the edge of the bed, and in the half light I see the length of her nightgown and the outline of her. She moves into the bed. We have not made love in years, and yet, without her saying anything, I know this is why she is here.

“Are you awake?” she says.

“Yes.”

She comes into the bed and curls herself with her back to me. It is familiar, and we know just what to do. I trace her arms with my fingers, her skin so different from the skin I touched the night before, ashy to my touch. I wrap my arms around her, and when it is time, we move together in silence with the yellow moonlight falling through the window. It is tender and beautiful, and for a moment it makes me sad, and I know, somehow, I know, that this is the last time we will ever make love.

After a while she says, “What happened to us, Arthur?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did we get so old?”

I look toward the window. I don’t know whether to laugh. I say, “I don’t know.”

“Well, it sucks.”

This time I do laugh. “It does.”

We fall asleep that way, her backed into me, my arms around her, my face pressed into the nape of her neck. When I wake in the morning, there is no sign of her. I roll toward her side of the bed and it is perfectly made, as if she never slept there. She is gone.

For a while there is silence in the room. Then the man says, “So, you killed her.”

Arthur sighs. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have you been listening to me?”

“Yes, of course we have. How did she die?”

“I suffocated her.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugs.

“Is there more to it?”

“There is always more to it. But not now. I am tired.”

He puts his head down on the desk then, and it feels good, having his head down. The desk is not wood but some kind of fake wood, and there is something cool about it, like when you put your head against the cool porcelain of a toilet when vomiting.

He thinks, I have nothing more to say. But now that they know the truth they will not let me go. Maybe he has erred, though there is only one story to tell and it needed to be told. He lifts his head as the man who does all the talking says, “There is someone we think you should meet.”

“Who?”

“He’s an attorney.”

“I don’t want a lawyer.”

“He’s not your lawyer. He’s … he’s not going to be your lawyer. He just is a lawyer.”

“I don’t care to meet him.”

“He came down here to see you. We’ll just bring him in for a moment, okay?”

He turns then, the man who does all the talking does, and all it takes is for him to turn and a moment later the door opens. A man comes in the room, late middle-aged, tall, a thick head of gray hair brushed back from a full, wide face. He wears a suit, a nice one, Arthur notices, though it doesn’t fit him particularly well.

“Hello, Arthur,” the new man, the lawyer, says, and he looks up at him, and suddenly there is a flicker of remembrance, and he knows he knows this man but he cannot put a finger on how.

“Hello,” he says.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No,” he says. “I do not.”

“My name is Russell Hurley.”

He sits up and looks at him. He peers at his face. He tilts his head to the side, as if this will provide a better look. He remembers being in his office and imagining Russell Hurley as he might become when he grew old. Now he is looking at the man’s face, and the effect is at once disconcerting and puzzling. Is this one of their stunts?

“The Russell Hurley I know is nineteen years old,” he says.

“Arthur,” he says. “We were classmates. At Lancaster. For most of a year, until I was … until I was asked to leave. We never talked about it, but I think you know why. But that is a matter for a long time ago, water under the bridge. We lived in the same dorm. We both lived in Spencer.”

“Impossible. You were a student last year. You played basketball. You dated Betsy Pappas.”

“All true,” the man says, bending his tall frame and putting his big hands down on the table in front of him. “Except that I was not a student last year. You and I were students together almost forty years ago.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Arthur, Betsy Pappas was your wife. You married her.”

EXPECTATIONS

Army specialist Ethan Winthrop, Lancaster School class of 2002, steps onto a dusty road and sees stars. His only crime is that he doesn’t mind being the first one out when the Hummer grinds to a halt, for while, outside, the midday sun is unrelenting, inside the crowded vehicle it is even hotter. Ethan opens the back door and climbs down. His rifle is slung over his right shoulder. Everything is quiet. Everything is still. It is whisper quiet. Ethan looks around. His eyes scan the cluster of small buildings and then beyond them to the open desert. Not a living thing moves, and this pleases him. Movement is what they train for. In truth, he loves this moment, being out front, sensing the men behind him without seeing them. All of it is right here for him, what he has been built for, he thinks. When he was first in-country, hearing a mortar land, the fear ran through him like water. Some men never get over that, but he has found this place where he can go where it all falls away, where things are simple: his footsteps, the heat, the weight of the rifle where it hangs off his shoulder like another arm.

He loves this realization about himself, that there is something in this world he’s good at, and just as he thinks this, he steps forward again, and now he hears something, a sound no more than a dull pop—confusing, really, this sound, the IED going off—and when he turns back to look at the men in his squad, there is that frozen-in-time moment when he sees something in their faces, surprise or horror, he cannot be sure. Everything is suddenly soupy. He wants to say, “Hey, fellas, what’s up? What is it?”

But Ethan Winthrop has no way of knowing that what they are looking at is vastly different from anything he can perceive. For the surreal truth is that half of Ethan’s face is no longer there, and unbeknownst to him as well, his right arm is skidding brightly across the dirt road like a cigarette butt someone has tossed.

From Basra they take Ethan Winthrop to Baghdad and then fly him to a hospital in Germany, where he lives nine long days made less miserable by pillowy morphine dreams. When the time comes, there isn’t a damn thing they can do for him anymore. He goes as quickly as smoke. His flag-draped casket joins others on a cargo plane, where it first goes to Andrews Air Force Base and then to Logan Airport, where it is taken by hearse to Lancaster, Vermont.

The funeral is held in the field house, and the crowd is tremendous. The entire student body is there, as are many alumni; the faculty, of course; the trustees; and then the full congressional delegation from Vermont and the governor, who has asked to say a few words. Chaplain Edwards leads the service and even delivers the eulogy, which surprises many, since when other students have died—a car accident, say—the headmaster became the willing repository for the community’s grief. This time is different, naturally, since it is the headmaster’s son, but they are so used to hearing from him on all matters great and small, it is a bit of a surprise that he sits with his head down in the front row during the entire service, and even more of a surprise when he is not in the receiving line afterward, but instead is spied walking out near the woods, his hands behind his back, his head hung low, like some country gentleman out for his afternoon constitutional. But since no one will try to measure a father’s grief, people keep their thoughts to themselves, and Mr. Winthrop is given a pass.

In the days that follow, the grand headmaster’s house fills with visitors. Trays of cold cuts and petit fours make their appearance on the large table in the dining room, get brought to the refrigerator, and then returned the next day as if they never left. Elizabeth is ever gracious with the visitors, and despite her lack of patience with being told to sit down or to relax—as if that were possible—she gives in to it for the most part, though it occurs to her that moments like these, the unfathomable trenches of life, are belittled by becoming excuses for people to indulge themselves. The whiskey and the gin and the vodka carafes are constantly in need of refilling, especially for her husband, who suddenly drinks scotch as if it were water. There is no blueprint for grief, she thinks, and Arthur is acting like a tortoise crossing a road: Sometimes his head is there, and then a moment later it is not. The only constant for him is that he now drinks with impunity, since no one dares give him an ounce of crap about it.

And for a week or so, Ethan Winthrop is the talk of campus. He is regarded, as the dead always are, more fondly than he was when he was alive.

Faculty members describe him as a sweet boy, someone who tried hard to fit in, always a challenge for the son of a headmaster. Some of them have been around long enough to remember his father as a boy, as a student, and against the shadow of a different war. His father, they say, was always quick to remind faculty of his station, of who his own father was. Not Ethan, who kept his head down and was, by all accounts, a pretty good kid.

Students and recent alums, classmates of Ethan’s, all seem to know him better than they did when he was alive, stories sprouting up out of nowhere, like the girl whom no one remembered throwing him so much as a bone claiming that he slipped it in her on the wrestling mats after the prom.

Then as a week passes and then two, the finely honed regimentation of the school takes over—the bells tolling, the classes, the athletics, the formal lunches and dinners—and suddenly no one talks about Ethan Winthrop anymore. He is confined to a distant memory, just someone everyone once knew, except in the great white Colonial on Main Street, where Elizabeth Winthrop has taken to spending all her free time in his old bedroom, still full of his life from just a year before, when he was a senior in high school. Here are his trophies from basketball and track, his posters, his prep school clothes still hung neatly in his closet.

In the afternoons, she sits in a rocking chair and moves back and forth, like some young girl in a group home soothed by the motion. She looks out the back to the soccer fields and the girls’ dorms and the woods of spruce and white pine that line that far side of campus before the river.

On the rare times she ventures out, no one talks directly to her; they only whisper around her about how tragic it all is. A man cut down in his early prime. Such promise! His whole life unfolding in front of him like a gilded path, if only he had chosen to take it.

The one other place Elizabeth finds solace is on the tennis court. She took up the game recently, and there are a few other women she plays with regularly, women on the same level, content to get the ball back across the net—each good shot a tiny miracle. But now she only wants to play by herself, and for hours at a time she stands next to a bucket of balls and strikes serve after serve. It is the metronomic thwack of ball against racket that she likes, the idea that her ancient, tired arm can still summon the strength to go high above her head and catch that ball in midair, stopping time for just a moment.

But mostly she sits in Ethan’s room, and when she does, she thinks of him not as the young man who went to war, but as the baby she carried inside her, the little kicker he was that whole nine months, always against her rib cage, rat-a-tat-tat over and over. “He’s got some left foot, Arthur,” she told her husband at the time, and that was enough to draw a hearty laugh from the normally taciturn Arthur, and that little boy fought to stay in her like he wanted nothing to do with this world, fourteen hours of relentless labor. And Elizabeth couldn’t blame him, coming out into all that noise and light, for who would choose that if they could?

But then, after they cut the cord, the nurse brought him close to her face, and Elizabeth just looked at him—his little features, his tiny nose, and his eyes with the glue all over the lids—and who cared that he was all purply from birth, she knew her own when she held him to her breast. He was a part of her more than anything else had ever been.

And Elizabeth desperately wants to believe that she was better for the time she had with him, watching him take those first tottering steps, and then seeing him rushing through the door as a boy and later as a man when sometimes she caught herself staring at him, surprised that this big, strong person was once a tiny peanut in her arms. But the truth is, she’s not sure. If she had never had him she would not hurt like she does, and maybe someday it will become a dull ache, but it will always be an ache, and sometimes, in those moments when the slightest of things reminds her of Ethan—a snowy afternoon on the quadrangle with boys playing touch football, their carefree voices melding into one youthful immortal cry—the ache becomes a deep hole in her chest, and she wants to die.

Sometimes she thinks of her life as a series of halting changes, as if she were a train that was suddenly moved to another set of tracks. She has this idea that other people—Arthur, for instance—live lives that follow more or less a straight narrative, as straight as a walk across a field. Hers, instead, plods along. Then something dramatic happens, a monumental decision, and everything changes until the plates shift underneath her again. It is not until the next rerouting occurs that she realizes she has been bracing for it the whole time.